Denford Software & Machines

I have a Micromill 2000 with vr milling. Excellent combination to start students on.

The school bought two Sherline 5400 mills (as opposed to Denford) because they are so much cheaper.

The Sherlines have Linux OS with EMC2 control software. This would be ok for a hobby guy at home.

But trying to teach on this just isn't working...plus the continual problems have just put me to my limits.

The Sherlines have stepper motors and are all parallell port based.

Is there anyway to switch these things over so they will run the denford VR milling software (which appears to be a serial based setup??)

Is there anyway to switch these things over so they will run the denford VR milling software

Unfortunately not.
Projects like EMC and Mach create stepper pulses inside the PC and send them out via the parallel port (and also USB based breakout boards)
This is completely different to the way VR Milling talks to the Baldor control cards - we send move commands to the board it and takes care of the step output.
That's why our machines are more expensive - the Baldor control we use is a quite expensive motion controller, but it works really well and is reliable.

There are other control systems you could try like Mach or DeskCNC which may be easier to teach.

Kind of figured that, but thanks for the run down. When it comes time to purchase again....knowing why Denford machines are more expensive will help me to sell/justify the cost. Thanks.

PS I would be SOL without this forum. Thanks to you and the Denford company for keeping the forum alive and successful

Thanks !

PS Never seen that one before - SOL